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Cucumber and Cheese Sandwich
Slice cucumbers thin, let stand in salt water ten minutes, drain, and place slices on thinly buttered white bread. Sprinkle with grated American cheese, put slices together, and garnish with a radish.
A three-minute sandwich whose only technique is the salt soak. Two details in the original text mean something different now than they did in 1909.
- "American cheese"In this period the phrase meant domestic factory-made cheddar, firm enough to grate. It is not the processed slice sold under that name today. Use a dry, sharp cheddar and grate it on the fine side.
- The salt soakTen minutes in salt water firms and lightly seasons the slices; how much moisture a dilute brine actually draws out is limited, so after draining press the slices between towels until they stop weeping. Slice as thin as you can manage. This is the only real technique in the recipe, and skipping the draining will leave the bread damp.
- Salt water proportionsNone are given. A tablespoon of salt to a quart of cold water is enough to draw moisture without making the cucumber inedibly salty. Do not season further before tasting.
- CucumbersThe recipe does not say to peel or seed. Field cucumbers of the period had tougher skins and coarser seeds than a modern English or Persian cucumber, which needs neither.
- Butter as a barrierButter on the crumb helps keep residual moisture off the bread, which is likely why it is specified here, though the original only says "thinly buttered." Use softened, not melted, butter and spread it to the very edges of the slice.
- Yield and timingNo yield is given. One medium cucumber and roughly two ounces of grated cheese should make about four to six sandwiches. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, keep them covered with a damp cloth, and cut just before serving.
- The radishA garnish, not a filling. Radishes cut into roses or fans were a common garnish of the period.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) belongs to a brief publishing wave of sandwich manuals aimed at women running afternoon teas, card parties and luncheons, when the sandwich was still novel enough as a social food to justify a book offering four hundred ways to make one. The cucumber sandwich itself is generally traced to the English tea table, where the vegetable's expense under glass made it a marker of leisure; the American version here democratizes it with grated domestic cheddar, a cheese then made in enormous quantity in New York and Wisconsin factories and sold simply as "American" to distinguish it from imported English cheese.